From vocalic detection to automatic emergence of vowel systems
François Pellegrino, Régine Andre-Obrecht · 2002
This paper presents our work on vowel system detection as part of a project of automatic language identification using phonological typologies. We have developed a vowel detection algorithm based on spectral analysis of the acoustic signal and requiring no learning stage. It has been tested with two telephone speech corpora: with a French corpus provided by the CNET, 7.4% of detections are false while about 25% of the vowels present in the signal are not found; and experiments with 5 languages of the OGI-TS corpus result in 88.1 % of correct detection and about 15 % of non-detection. We also present the vector quantization (VQ) LBG-Rissanen (1980, 1983) algorithm that we use for vowel system modeling. Preliminary experiments are reported.